Parabellum Games

Hull University Visit

Posted in Personal by yaustar on March 15, 2008

I was meant to write this up last weekend but have been remarkable busy over the past week. A small handful of us was asked to give a talk to the current MScs of the course we took 2 years before.

The whole day was pretty cool, it was great being able to catch up with our old tutors and each other. Honestly, it was like being back at University again (and that isn’t a bad thing :) ).

We did the usual talk and attempted to answer as many questions as we could and we were surprised at both the level of skill and experience that the students generally had and the some of the questions that were asked.

All the portfolios I saw were extremely high quality and don’t foresee many of them having trouble getting job interviews when they start applying. Quite a few of them already have previous experience in related industries which will help a lot. Overall, it looked very promising for this year.

As for the questions, I honestly expected more ‘break into’ questions, such as anything related to tests, CV and portfolio questions. Instead, we got questions about areas we take for granted such as flextime, technology, recognition of work in the company, which companies to work for and avoid. We really had forgotten what it was like to be sitting where they were.

To round off the day, we all hopped into the union for a few drinks with the head of course Jon and just chatted about industry and the course.

Overall, a pretty good day. Thoroughly enjoyed it and would definitely do something like that again.

How I broke into the Games Industry

Posted in Articles, Personal by yaustar on August 30, 2007

Abstract

A small recap of events starting from I decided I wanted to be a games developer to present day including all the mistakes and turning points along the way.

Young and lazy

During A-levels, I started to get really lazy at school and more or less went through a rebel phrase where I honestly didn’t care about anything let alone my future and just wanted to have fun with my friends. So, when it came filling in the UCAS form (UK University forms), I really didn’t know what to put in and I didn’t talk to my parents about it. The deadline loomed so I literally made a snap decision that I wanted to do something with computers since they interested me somewhat.

Continue reading here.

In this month’s Edge Magazine…

Posted in Homebrew Development, Personal by yaustar on January 22, 2007

… there is a profile of the University where I did my Masters which is kind of cool :) . Even better is that they did a company profile of Blimey! and in the photo was one of my University friends sitting in the ‘corner’ who started last summer :p.

I have also just ordered Infinite Crisis and Crisis on Infinite Earth from Amazon to find out what the big fuss is about these two sagas. I am also eagerly waiting for the Civil War graphic novels to be released from Marvel :) .

On the development side, I am currently working on a simple TicTacToe tutorial but detailing more about the thinking behind the code, common standards and gotchas rather then teaching the language itself. Not sure how the whole thing will pan out but it be interesting to see the feedback from it when I finish.

Summary on the past couple of Days

Posted in Personal by yaustar on September 2, 2006

Get the report finished and binded, crashed at Myks for the night in Hull and manage to arrange a demonstration of my work for the same day (lucky). So that’s really it, I am no longer a student at the University of Hull, can’t believe it has been one year already :/. Managed to see a few friends off and hopefully they will all get jobs in the industry.

Just reformatted my computer last nigh, I *was* going to upgrade from 2000 to XP, however after I formatted the drive, a whole lot of fiddling about with floppies and drivers for my RAID setup and started the setup, I get asked for the CD-Key which is on the receipt which I can’t find :( . “No problem” I thought since I can get it from the online system. Heh, no such luck. The account is already disabled since the 1st of September >:(.

Therefore, I am no BACK on 2000 and wasted an entire day :/

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Report. Finished. At. Last.

Posted in Personal by yaustar on August 28, 2006

I hope this flipping passes…

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